Emotion in Music: Seeking Genuine Feeling from Medieval Devotion to American Spirituals
Emotion in music
The problem of musical emotion is easy to recognise but frustratingly difficult to classify or quantify. Listeners seek music for many purposes: to dance, to admire technical ingenuity, to appreciate melody, or, increasingly, to absorb dazzling visual accompaniment. A slick music video can disguise weak musicianship. Celebrity stadium concerts, surrounded by merchandise, often serve more as subcultural flag‑planting than musical experiences. Streaming platforms like Spotify reduce all genres to the common denominator of “songs.” Because music rarely arrives with useful metadata, a listener may struggle to identify what is playing except in the vaguest terms. Fragments of repertoire under generic titles are accessible, but for obscure composers almost nothing can be found. Few users mind: most listen passively, treating streamed audio like airport ambience. Brian Eno’s 1979 Music for Airports arguably contained more substance than much of what fills today’s playlists.
When we do listen attentively, emotional impact becomes a central motive. Emotion is deeply subjective; the intensity a pre‑teen feels for a pop song could equal an adult’s response to a Beethoven string quartet. Yet these dyads of composition and listener are coloured by cultural packages of age, gender, class, and other variables. We are taught what we ought to like, and we conform. This makes it nearly impossible to judge the emotional force of unfamiliar traditions. Central Asian music, for instance, sounds impassioned to the outside ear, but without knowledge of the language or the culture it is impossible to know how local listeners are moved.
A powerful thread running through music history connects emotion with spiritual values, cutting across many genres and eras. From the earliest surviving works up to the Baroque, almost every major composer produced primarily religious music. After Bach and his sons, a significant rift appears: writing music that expressed spiritual values became a minority preoccupation. By Beethoven’s time the Missa Solemnis (1819–1823) stood as an outlier in an otherwise secular output. In the twentieth century only committed believers such as Olivier Messiaen, John Tavener, and Arvo Pärt devoted serious attention to sacred composition.
The history of popular music is more fragmented. Renaissance folk songs sometimes carried religious content, especially when tied to seasonal celebrations like carols. Yet the earliest printed popular songs – the sixteenth‑century Italian fogli volanti sold in streets – were already largely secular. As documentation accelerated in the nineteenth century, secular subjects had won decisively. Lightweight material triumphed over religious intensity.
Elsewhere in Europe the sacred and secular stayed intertwined. Scandinavia, in particular, long combined folk melodies with spiritual lyrics. This blend crossed the Atlantic and persisted in conservative folk forms, early blues, ballads, and certain church singing traditions. References to non‑Christian supernatural experience also survived, allowing intense emotion to break through. Where communities constructed their own worship, these emotional reserves endured. It is hard to imagine the Anglican hymnal producing comparable intensity; state religion tends to suppress spontaneous expression. In the United States, where religious reinvention is almost a national institution and many communities remained isolated from mainstream trends, church services could be extraordinarily powerful. The direct connection between supplicant and the divine energises congregations. The diversity is not merely musical – Holiness‑Pentecostal churches in Appalachia handle poisonous snakes as a test of faith, interpreting biblical passages as a command to do so.
While acknowledging the subjectivity of such judgments, this essay tries to identify key periods, composers, styles in popular music, and folk songs that convey a genuine emotional experience. The common thread is supernatural experience, and it is proposed that no other theme – romantic love included – retains the same impact.
The Middle Ages
One of the earliest records of popular religious song is the collection of songs to the Virgin Mary commissioned by Alfonso the Wise (1221–1284) in the thirteenth century, the Cantigas de Santa María (composed from about 1270 onward). These songs, preserved in a lavishly illuminated manuscript depicting musicians and singers, recount the Virgin’s miracles. Long and often complex, they were apparently performed with multiple instrumentalists who may have improvised against one another. Alfonso’s court included both Moorish and Christian musicians, distinguishable by skin colour and dress. Musicians are often shown in pairs with similar instruments, perhaps improvising in the pattern of jazz or bluegrass counterpoint. It is engaging to imagine a kind of music that mingled very different traditions – common before the expulsion of the Moors in 1609 – but this should not distract from the primacy of the texts and their popular devotion. The Cantigas were no abstract exercise; they fused faith and feeling with an intensity greater than the intricate but often formulaic compositions of the contemporary troubadours and trouvères.
At this time, the only music for which we have notation was monophonic. Surviving folk polyphony on Mediterranean islands such as Corsica and Sardinia, as well as in the Balkans, suggests that two‑ and three‑part singing existed, but reconstructing its sound from modern parallels is unreliable. Written polyphony developed from the Notre‑Dame organum, which began as a tenor against a drone. By the fourteenth century polyphony was well established in church music and in many secular forms. Masterpieces such as the Messe de Nostre Dame (1365) by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300‑1377) testify to its power to move listeners.
Machaut stood on the edge of the transition to polyphony; roughly half his output remains monophonic. Religious polyphonic Masses and devotional works came to dominate church performance through the next two centuries, culminating in the greatest master of the idiom, Josquin des Prez (c. 1450‑1521). Yet toward the end of the period, compositional ingenuity had grown decadent, obscuring the religious message. Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Maria Zart (?1504) probably marks the high point of that trend, calculated by reference to star charts. A subtext of the Reformation was precisely this complaint: musical complexity was masking the divine word, and settings needed to become plainer and more comprehensible. Composers such as Palestrina (1525‑1594) embodied this changed aesthetic. Luther, too, encouraged simple, attractive melodies. It is controversial to argue that these new styles represented the beginning of an emotional decline, replaced by a kind of musical theatre – elaborate showpieces that valued impact over spiritual depth.
Biber and the Baroque
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644‑1704), a Bohemian‑Austrian composer and violinist of the early Baroque, produced works that characteristically combine playfulness with intensity. A virtuoso violinist, he worked mainly in Graz and Kroměříž. His violin oeuvre still challenges modern players, and the Rosenkranz Sonatas (1676) are unlike almost anything else from the period. Fifteen sonatas charting the trial and crucifixion of Jesus are each written in a different scordatura – a non‑standard tuning. The climax comes at sonata XI, where the crucifixion is represented by intensive tremolos, sometimes spanning several strings. This music is difficult to hear often, so taxing is its emotional impact.
Ironically, given the Protestant objection to obscure polyphony, Biber also composed some of the most challenging polychoral works of his time. Only Orazio Benevoli (1605‑1672) preceded him; the fifty‑three‑part Missa Salisburgensis was long attributed to Benevoli but is now dated to 1682 and assigned to Biber, who manipulates immense choral forces to create a very intense experience.
Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail”
Robert Johnson (1911‑1938) was a short‑lived blues singer who wandered Mississippi in the 1930s, recording around twelve sides in the late 1920s. He was not a conventional Christian believer, but subscribed to folk beliefs common in black communities of the period. His songs overflow with references to magical practices and supernatural ideas. Two of his most explicit songs in this vein are “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Crossroads.” In the former he depicts a spiritual beast pursuing him:
And the days keeps on worryin’ me
There’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail
The latter’s lyrics reveal a fear of invisibility:
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, now, save poor Bob if you please”
Standin’ at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooh‑ee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn’t nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
A story later crystallised claiming Johnson met the devil at a midnight crossroad and traded his soul for exceptional guitar technique. The blues revival rediscovered him, and rock groups such as Cream covered his songs, though there is no evidence they engaged with his spiritual preoccupations.
Penderecki and the “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”
Krzysztof Penderecki (1933‑2020) was a Polish composer of the post‑war generation, a Catholic who wrote a considerable amount of religious music. Yet nothing he produced had quite the impact of an early work, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961). The piece uses an orchestra of fifty‑two independent string instruments, each playing a series of glissandi with dissonant intervals. The sound resembles the distant wailing of victims, and it justly made a huge impact at the time.
“Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”
In the 1920s the English folk‑song collector Cecil Sharp travelled to the Appalachian Mountains to find surviving ballad traditions. Besides ballads he discovered a diverse repertoire of local songs, which he published in Folk Songs of the Appalachians (1929). Among them were songs dealing with Christian and spiritual belief. In 1965 musicologist John Cohen made a recording trip to the same area of North Carolina and Virginia to see what remained, and found it still lively – some singers still lived in the same houses Sharp had visited. The recordings were eventually released on the LP High Atmosphere (Rounder Records 0028, 1975).
A particularly striking singer was Lloyd Chandler, whose “A Conversation with Death” imagines a dialogue with the figure of Death, pleading not to come so soon. The song seems to reach back to William Dunbar’s late medieval “Timor Mortis Conturbat Me”:
He hes done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Frank Proffitt sang “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” and “Remember Me and Do Pray For Me” – both intense songs of faith. Appalachia was still remote at that time, unaware of folk festivals and conscious revival movements. The unforced, dramatic delivery of these songs speaks of a world of direct belief.
“I Say to You, Your Lord Is a Jellybean”
As former slaves migrated to towns in the southern United States in the early twentieth century, they generated an expressive approach to religion. In segregated southern towns “storefront preachers” operated on the street and in front rooms; surviving recordings show a comparable intensity. A striking example uses coloured jelly beans to tell the Christian salvation story:
- Red – Jesus’ blood
- Green – New life
- Yellow – Heaven
- White – Purity/Forgiveness
- Black – Sin
- Purple – Royalty
Today this became the “Jelly Bean Prayer,” used to help children understand the Gospel. The original preached versions, however, expressed faith rather than pedagogy.
“Been in the Storm So Long”
On the Georgia Sea Islands, where African language forms such as Gullah survived long after they had died out elsewhere, popular singing is extremely passionate and powerful. In Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? Carawan and Carawan (1989) describe the music of this isolated community. The repertoire of hymns is locally constructed, sung in a call‑and‑response pattern probably inherited from African roots. Recordings of this music exist.
Angola Prison Farm
In 1932 John and Alan Lomax visited Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana. These prisons were exceptionally brutal, and the inmates were entirely African‑American. They worked long hours in the fields, and to keep rhythm with their swinging picks and hoes they developed call‑and‑response songs that strongly resemble African work songs. These were sung with a weary resignation that reflects the experience of slavery and exclusion even more than incarceration. Because prison farms like Angola were isolated from the outside world, the Lomaxes believed they preserved the purest form of African‑American song culture, untouched by popular trends. The Lomaxes recorded several plantation‑era songs that originated during slavery.
Sacred Polyphony in Corsica
All the Mediterranean islands retain some form of polyphony. In Corsica it is either repurposed or performed as part of the liturgy. Vocal music for services employs three‑part polyphony with clashing intervals that European classical tradition would have expunged. Its roots are in Gregorian chant and the art of falsobordone, where independent vocal lines weave in complex harmony without instruments. Used during funerals, Holy Week, and other sacred events, it includes chants such as the Kyrie and Agnus Dei. Corsican polyphonic songs (pulifunie) are performed a cappella and can be either spiritual or secular. Hymns, motets, and funeral songs (lamentu) belong to the former; the nanna (lullaby) and the paghjella to the latter. Traditionally, four‑ to six‑voice improvised polyphony was sung only by men, except for the voceru performed by women. Since UNESCO recognised this polyphonic singing as Intangible Heritage in 2009, it has been absorbed into the World Music category – probably an unhealthy development.
“God’s Gonna Cut You Down”
“God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (also known as “God Almighty’s Gonna Cut You Down” or “Run on for a Long Time”) is a traditional American folk song first recorded in the 1940s. The warning of God’s judgment runs through every line: evildoers cannot escape. In 2003 the Piedmont blues artist Odetta recorded a version on her album Gonna Let It Shine; Johnny Cash’s 2006 posthumous cover broadened the song’s audience. Whatever its editorial history, the core lyrics deal unmistakably with divine vengeance and final judgment.
“Go tell that long-tongued liar, go tell that midnight rider, tell the gambler, the rambler, the back-biter, tell them God Almighty’s gonna cut them down.”
Perhaps the most influential rendition is Johnny Cash’s on the posthumously released American V: A Hundred Highways (2006). Many singers have covered it—including Elvis Presley—which rather suggests they did not fully grasp the lyrics’ somber tone.
### 12. ‘Ain’t no grave gonna hold this body down’
‘Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold This Body Down’ is an American gospel song credited to Claude Ely (1922–1978), a songwriter and preacher from Virginia. He claimed to have composed it in 1934 at age twelve while ill with tuberculosis. His family prayed for his recovery, and in response he spontaneously performed this song. This sounds like mythologizing, since a related text appears in a 1933 Church of God in Christ hymnal. The piece has become a strong favorite among white country singers because of the intensity of feeling it expresses. Performances such as Molly Skaggs’s at Bethel Church turn the music into an ecstatic portrayal of the end times. Typical lyrics include:
Shame is a prison as cruel as a grave Shame is a robber and he’s come to take my name Oh, love is my redeemer, lifting me up from the ground And love is the power when my freedom song is found
There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down When I hear the trumpet sound Gonna get up outa the ground There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
### 13. Emotion and the thread of the supernatural
These examples share a common thread: their concern with spiritual values. From the early roots of polyphony in the medieval era to folk traditions in the New World, matters of faith and worries about death
underline a shared theme. Christianity is the common underlying element, but as a few rare early blues recordings show, folk beliefs with African roots also preoccupied singers. After the Middle Ages, a gradual turn toward secularism in the classical or composed tradition led to the suppression of emotional expression in favor of a constrained, polite version.
This essay argues that whatever we say, we do not welcome too much emotion in our music. In mass societies, emotion is disruptive and unruly, intruding on everyday order. We want shared values, and despite our conventional allegiance to diversity, an abundance of emotional diversity feels threatening. Classical music, in particular, operates within a culturally received framework connecting audience and composer, and the wild disorder of religious folk traditions disrupts that link. Composers of the Middle Ages understood this, until forces of conformity and complexity smoothed away the rough edges. Perhaps only the rather special context of North America allowed those forces to be unleashed again.